Russian Revolution of 1905: Bloody Sunday to October Manifesto

The Russian Revolution of 1905 was a wave of mass strikes, peasant uprisings, mutinies and political protest that shook the Russian Empire from January 1905 until mid-1907. It began when troops shot peaceful marchers in St Petersburg on “Bloody Sunday” and forced Tsar Nicholas II to grant civil liberties and an elected parliament, the Duma. Although the autocracy survived, the revolution changed Russian politics and foreshadowed the far greater upheaval of 1917.

Background: an empire under strain

At the start of the twentieth century Russia was an autocracy: the tsar ruled without a constitution or elected legislature. Rapid industrialisation in the 1890s, driven by finance minister Sergei Witte, had created a new urban working class crowded into St Petersburg, Moscow, Łódź, Baku and other centres. Workers faced long hours, low pay and no legal right to strike or form unions.

The countryside was poorer still. Peasants, emancipated from serfdom only in 1861, were burdened with redemption payments and short of land. Non-Russian peoples, including Poles, Finns, Jews, Georgians and the peoples of the Baltic provinces, resented policies of Russification and discrimination.

Political opposition was also growing. Liberals in the zemstvos (elected local councils) wanted a constitution; the Socialist Revolutionaries appealed to peasants and used assassination; and the Marxist Social Democrats, split since 1903 into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, organised among workers. In July 1904 the hated interior minister Vyacheslav von Plehve was killed by a Socialist Revolutionary bomb.

The decisive spark came from abroad. The Russo-Japanese War, begun in February 1904, went badly from the start. The fortress of Port Arthur surrendered on 2 January 1905, and each defeat further discredited the government.

Bloody Sunday

In St Petersburg, a priest named Georgy Gapon led a legal, police-tolerated workers’ organisation, the Assembly of Russian Factory and Mill Workers. In mid-January 1905 a strike at the giant Putilov works spread across the capital. Gapon and the workers drew up a petition asking the tsar for an eight-hour day, better wages, a constituent assembly and civil rights.

On Sunday 22 January 1905 (9 January in the Julian calendar then used in Russia), tens of thousands of people, many carrying icons and portraits of the tsar, marched in several columns towards the Winter Palace. Nicholas II was not in the city. At several points troops opened fire on the unarmed crowds.

The official figure was around 130 killed and several hundred wounded; opposition sources at the time claimed far more, and historians generally accept a toll in the low hundreds. The massacre destroyed the popular image of the tsar as a protective “little father” and set off strikes across the empire.

A year of revolt

Through 1905 the unrest took many forms. Strikes spread from St Petersburg to Moscow, the Baltic provinces, Poland and the Caucasus. In February the tsar’s uncle, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, was assassinated in Moscow by the Socialist Revolutionary Ivan Kalyayev. In June an armed uprising broke out in Łódź in Russian Poland.

Defeat at the Battle of Tsushima in May 1905, where the Japanese navy destroyed Russia’s Baltic Fleet, deepened the crisis. In June sailors on the battleship Potemkin of the Black Sea Fleet mutinied, killed several officers and sailed to Odessa, where the city was already in turmoil. Failing to spread the revolt to the rest of the fleet, they later surrendered the ship in Romania.

In the countryside, peasants seized land, cut timber and burned manor houses, especially in the central black-earth provinces and the Volga region. Professional people formed unions, and in May many of these joined in a Union of Unions led by liberals.

The government’s first concession, announced in August 1905, was a purely consultative Duma with a narrow franchise, known after the interior minister as the “Bulygin Duma”. It satisfied almost no one. Peace with Japan was signed at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in September, but the domestic crisis continued.

The general strike and the October Manifesto

In October 1905 a railway strike grew into a general strike that brought much of the empire to a halt. Railways, telegraphs, factories, schools and shops closed. In St Petersburg, strikers elected the Soviet (council) of Workers’ Deputies, a new kind of body that coordinated the strike and issued its own newspaper. Its most prominent figure was the young Marxist Leon Trotsky.

Facing paralysis, Nicholas II reluctantly accepted Witte’s advice. On 30 October 1905 (17 October Old Style) he issued the October Manifesto, promising freedom of conscience, speech, assembly and association, a broader franchise, and that no law would take effect without the approval of an elected State Duma. Witte became chairman of the new Council of Ministers.

The manifesto divided the opposition. Moderate liberals who accepted it formed the Union of 17 October, known as the Octobrists, while the Constitutional Democrats (Kadets) pressed for more. Socialists rejected it. At the same time right-wing groups, later called the Black Hundreds, staged violent pogroms against Jews and others; in Odessa alone hundreds were killed.

Repression and the Duma

From late 1905 the government regained the initiative. The St Petersburg Soviet was arrested in December. A Bolshevik-led armed uprising in Moscow in December was crushed after about ten days of street fighting, much of it in the Presnya district, with an estimated 1,000 or more deaths. Punitive expeditions restored order along the railways, in the Baltic provinces and in rebellious villages.

In April 1906 a large French loan eased the government’s finances, and Witte resigned soon afterwards. The Fundamental Laws issued just before the First Duma met kept the tsar’s control of the army, foreign policy and ministers, gave him an absolute veto and allowed him to rule by decree when the Duma was not sitting.

The First Duma, dominated by Kadets and peasant deputies, opened in May 1906 and was dissolved after about ten weeks. Pyotr Stolypin, prime minister from July 1906, combined harsh repression with land reform. Field courts-martial sent more than a thousand people to execution, and the noose became known as “Stolypin’s necktie”. The Second Duma was dissolved in June 1907, and a new electoral law heavily favoured landowners. Historians usually treat this “coup of 3 June” as the end of the revolution.

Key people

• Nicholas II (1868-1918), the last tsar, who conceded reforms only under pressure and later tried to roll them back.
• Georgy Gapon (1870-1906), the priest who led the Bloody Sunday march; he was later killed by Socialist Revolutionaries who suspected him of working for the police.
• Sergei Witte (1849-1915), the statesman behind industrialisation, the Treaty of Portsmouth and the October Manifesto.
• Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), leading figure in the St Petersburg Soviet, arrested in December 1905.
• Pyotr Stolypin (1862-1911), prime minister who suppressed the revolution and attempted agrarian reform.

Consequences

The revolution did not overthrow the monarchy, but it ended pure autocracy in law. Russia now had an elected legislature, legal political parties and trade unions, and a less censored press. These freedoms were real but fragile, and the government frequently restricted them.

Some non-Russian regions won concessions. Finland had its autonomy restored and in 1906 introduced universal suffrage, including votes for women, among the first in Europe. Elsewhere, especially in Poland and the Baltic provinces, repression was severe.

The events of 1905 also showed the limits of the regime’s support. Loyal troops, once the war with Japan ended, proved decisive in restoring order; in 1917 the army would not stand by the tsar.

Timeline

• 1905, 2 January: Port Arthur surrenders to Japan.
• 1905, 22 January: Bloody Sunday in St Petersburg.
• 1905, 17 February: Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich assassinated in Moscow.
• 1905, 27 June: Mutiny on the battleship Potemkin.
• 1905, October: General strike; St Petersburg Soviet formed.
• 1905, 30 October: Nicholas II issues the October Manifesto.
• 1905, December: St Petersburg Soviet arrested; Moscow uprising crushed.
• 1906, May: First State Duma opens; dissolved in July.
• 1907, 16 June: Second Duma dissolved and electoral law changed.

Legacy

The 1905 revolution became a training ground for the revolutionaries of 1917. Soviets reappeared in the February and October revolutions, and Trotsky again led the Petrograd Soviet. Lenin later called 1905 a “dress rehearsal” for the Bolshevik seizure of power.

It also left a strong cultural memory. The Potemkin mutiny inspired Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 film Battleship Potemkin, and Bloody Sunday became a symbol of state violence against peaceful protest. Like the Decembrist Revolt eighty years earlier, 1905 was later celebrated in Soviet histories as part of a long struggle against tsarism.

Why it matters

The Russian Revolution of 1905 was the first great crisis of the Romanov dynasty in the modern age. It forced Russia into a limited constitutional experiment, exposed the gulf between ruler and people, and created the tactics and institutions that brought the empire down twelve years later.